This invention relates to a hand held motor-vibrated seeder or more generally to a particle dispenser for dispensing powder particles into a chemist's weighing dish, or dispensing seeds sequentially into earth-containing pockets of a grower's seedling tray, otherwise known as a plug tray.
A chemist is often required to weigh out exact quantities of each of several chemical powders that will be mixed and chemically co-reacted. This laboratory weighing process typically consists of manually shaking a powder from a container onto a weighing dish for weighing. Ideally, the shaking is stopped when the desired weight is reached, but because great precision is required, it is difficult to stop at the right moment because of the irregular and uncontrolled powder-pouring rate.
The term "particle" as used hereinafter is meant to include seeds.
Home owners and other small scale growers of flowers and vegetables tolerate the imprecision of dispensing seeds directly by hand, and often compensate by awaiting sprouting after which they may then be thinned by hand.
For larger scale growers, the direct dispensing by hand is not tolerable because of the associated large labor costs. For commercial growers, there is described in my patent U.S. Pat. No. 5,414,955, issued May 16, 1995, a seeder that simultaneously picks up many individual seeds and simultaneously dispenses each one in a corresponding of regularly spaced apart seedling-tray pockets.
For small scale growers, there has been used a hand held seeder having a handle and a V-shaped spatula mounted in the handle. A buzzer and a battery are mounted together and to the spatula end in that is mounted in the handel. Such buzzers have a coil of wire wound about an iron core and flexible conductive ferrous reed having one end fixedly mounted and the opposite end normally lying against an electrical contact. One end of the wire coil is electrically connected to the fixed end of the reed.
When a voltage is applied to the contact and the other end of the wire coil, the reed and contact serve momentarily as a closed electrical switch, causing a current in the coil that produces a magnetic field that draws the other end of the reed to hammer the core, ending a first vibration cycle. This breaks the circuit and the reed falls back on the contact which begins a sequence of such cycles of buzzer vibrations.
It is an object of this invention to provide a particle dispenser providing improved particle singulation and improved dispensing accuracy.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a particle dispenser that dispenses particles at a slow and more constant rate.
It is another object of this invention to provide such a dispenser suitable for being manufactured as a hand-held particle dispenser.